


i hopped that fence when i was seventeen (then i knew what i wanted)

by constellationsofsentences



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Domestic Fluff, Established Relationship, Fluff, I'm ignoring cdth but also ? not ?, M/M, Marriage Proposal, Rings, idk im just doing my own thing this probably doesnt fit anywhere in canon, tfw u accidentally dream an engagement ring for ur boyfriend
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-03
Updated: 2020-07-03
Packaged: 2021-03-04 06:27:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,388
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24829072
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/constellationsofsentences/pseuds/constellationsofsentences
Summary: Ronan falls asleep to the soft sound of Adam’s quiet snores.When he wakes up, he’s holding a ring.
Relationships: Ronan Lynch/Adam Parrish
Comments: 12
Kudos: 178





	i hopped that fence when i was seventeen (then i knew what i wanted)

**Author's Note:**

> this suuuuuucks but ive been working on it for like 3 months and im tired so. have it. hope you like it hahaha
> 
> title from garden song by phoebe bridgers

Ronan falls asleep to the soft sound of Adam’s quiet snores.

When he wakes up, he’s holding a ring.

It’s tasteful, sure, Adam-like in its simplicity; a thin silver band that Ronan knows will look perfect on his long, tanned fingers, knows it because it was Adam who wore it in his dream the night before. Adam, who’d stretched his arms around the forest as if to say _look what you’ve built. Why not build something more?_

Ronan had felt the soft shift of the mattress as he sat down on the bed, nestled among the flowers. He shifted to sit beside Adam. The long grass around them reached his knees, the mud beneath his toes cooling, reassuring.

Adam reached down, plucking a fern from the ground and rolling its stem between his index finger and thumb. Ronan watched. Ronan couldn’t not watch Adam: the whirr of his fingers, the glint of the ring in the gentle light.

He looked at him, and his lashes shaded the intensity of his expression but it was there, nevertheless.

“Take it,” Adam had said, pressing the ring into Ronan’s palm like he was giving communion. Ronan, shaking, brought it to his mouth, breathed in the taste of the future. He watched the dream Adam smile at him. It was tight the way it always was, but there was a languidness behind it, a soft declaration Ronan could almost hear. “Ronan,” the dream Adam said.

“ _Tamquam_ ,” Ronan had said, as the whistling of the trees got so loud it was almost quiet again.

But the dream Adam only smiled.

How do you tell someone you love that you love them? Ronan is many things, but he is not a liar. Adam breathes gently next to him, and Ronan tries to match it. _Two bodies in tandem_ – that was what his father had told him love was. Words like _togetherness,_ like _united_ and _harmony_ and _perfection_ had been thrown around, juggled idly like facts of life.

Maybe Ronan and Adam are together, but they aren’t united. Ronan himself is far from perfect, and though he’s closer to it Adam isn’t either. They fight over the smallest of things: whether scrambled eggs are better than fried, and are poached eggs even worth it at all? Snipes over Adam’s schedule compared to Ronan’s embellish practically every conversation they have. Gansey calls it “domestic”, and Blue rolls her eyes and tells Gansey to get stuffed, but that they’re genuinely disgusting (he’s not sure if that’s a compliment. Whichever she means, he’d take it as the opposite). If Niall-and-Aurora was perfect harmony, soulmates made from the stars of Niall’s dreams, Ronan-and-Adam are nowhere close.

Adam is so much sometimes. He glares at Ronan and says: “Why are you doing this?” or “Don’t be an idiot,” and Ronan feels his own mind changing and shifting. He’ll say something annoying and Adam will roll his eyes and neither will acknowledge the love that Ronan feels is radiating from all angles of his body. But it’s there. It lives beneath his skin all the time, hides under his tongue, so that every time Ronan says: “What’s up, shitbag?” he means _I love you._

He makes a fist, the ring pressing against the palm of his hand. Adam has his back to him. He’s not wearing a shirt; Ronan can trace the line of his freckles, the muscles of his back, the uneven line where his hair ends. Daylight is already beginning to erase the shadow he leaves on the white sheets. Ronan stares at the ceiling, clutches at the ring tighter. Adam’s feet press against his leg, his shoulder touching Ronan’s. His feet are slightly cold, enough that they leave a cooling imprint on Ronan’s skin. Adam sighs contentedly.

“Fucking shit,” Ronan mutters. He shifts to sit on the edge of the bed. A sun-shaped mark has imprinted on his palm beneath the ring. It almost seems to glow, even in the bright light of the early summer morning.

Through the window, Ronan thinks he can hear Lindenmere. The trees speak Latin, and today, they speak of love. _Non dubita_ , they seem to say, their voices trailing on the wind. _Non dubita._

Gansey’s smile is as wide as his teeth are white. “Hello!” he cries. “Here we are at the Salvation Mountain!” He raises the phone camera to show it off, but misjudges the angle so Ronan is treated to a nice view of the sky and part of Cheng’s hair. It’s managed to gain at least two inches in the three months since Ronan last saw it. If he liked Cheng, he might make a joke about it. He doesn’t, he insists to himself, and so he says: “I thought you were going to see the Grand Canyon.”

“We _were._ But then we got derailed. You know how it is. Blue wants to go to Cincinnati.”

The top corner of Blue’s head appears on the screen. “They have an abandoned subway station which sounds cool. Henry wants to come too, anyway.”

Cheng shouts something Ronan can’t identify, to the tune of a song he doesn’t know.

“Can’t you find something a little… closer?”

“Well, you know what they say,” says Gansey. “The farther the journey, the greater the rewards.”

Ronan mimes vomiting with his free hand, and accidentally drops the ring. Henry, very quietly, screams. Blue grabs the phone to inspect for herself, and Gansey begins to squawk. Henry’s chants of “That was definitely a ring, Dick, definitely,” don’t seem to be doing much to alleviate his confusion.

Blue, all business, says, “You’re going to be a nightmare of a husband.” She has positioned herself so all he can see is hairclips; somebody appears to be trying to wrench the phone from her hand.

Ronan presents her with his middle finger. She laughs. “Where’d you get it, anyway?”

He grunts. “Dreamt it.”

Gansey sucks in the biggest breath Ronan’s ever heard. “Ronan,” he says, because it's easier than saying _I hope you know what you're doing._

“Dick,” Ronan replies, because it’s easier than saying _I know_.

Gansey looks at him, and Ronan knows he understands. They’ve been away for almost a year by now, but time can only change so much.

“When?” Gansey asks.

“Last night.”

“On purpose?” comes Cheng’s voice, and then somebody else asking them to move out of the way so they can take a selfie.

Gansey shields his eyes to look at them, even though he’s already wearing sunglasses. The video shakes as they shuffle together to the side.

“Wait, seriously,” asks Cheng, “was it on purpose?”

Ronan blinks. “No, of course it wasn’t. I don’t just dream shit like that for fun—it’s my subconscious or whatever.”

Blue leans into the camera, and Ronan gets a good look at her shit-eating grin before she says: “Aw, your subconscious is a big _softie_.”

“Could it have been?” asks Gansey, suddenly.

“What?”

“On purpose—could you have done it on purpose?”

And—fuck. Ronan is many things, but he is not a liar.

He is, however, a coward. “Maybe,” he says, and promptly hangs up.

He’s already got three texts from Gansey by the time he returns to bed, ring stowed in the pocket of his sweats. _We love you, We trust you, You got this._

With all the affection in his heart, Ronan replies: _If u tell declan i will murder you._

Then, reluctantly: _thanks._

Adam is lying in bed, sleep-mussed and soft, eyes warm and honey-brown. “Who were you talking to?” he asks, the tiredness thinning the _g_ and letting his accent peek between the lines.

Ronan throws himself onto his front, rests his chin on Adam’s stomach. “Dick.”

“He called you? Aren’t they in the middle of the Grand Canyon?”

“They got _derailed_ ,” Ronan replies. “Place called the Salvation Mountain. Looked like California, or some shit.”

Adam makes a soft sound. “At least they aren’t wasting gas.”

Ronan doesn’t reply. Instead, he kicks his legs out in an attempt to regain some blankets. His socks can only do so much, and his feet are cold. He guides himself up to lean against his boyfriend, relishing in the softness of him, the uncomfortable way their elbows dig into each other and the way Adam rolls his eyes and taps his toes against Ronan’s shin.

“What’re you gonna do today? ‘Cause I need to study.”

“Parrish,” Ronan says, half-muffled in the warmth of Adam’s body. “It’s your last fuckin’ day here.”

“I know, I know. Only Fletcher made me join his film club, and that means I’m gonna miss out on study time next weekend—“

“Parrish. You can watch all the gay movies you like and still get a fat hundred on all your exams. Nobody’s gonna... You’re _leaving_ tomorrow. I want—” He cuts off, sharply. Ronan wants a lot of things. Ronan doesn’t know if he can handle sharing that fact, not right now, not with the ring weighing down his pocket and Gansey’s question running circles in his brain.

Adam knows, anyway. He presses a kiss behind his ear. “Alright. You got me. I’d rather stay in bed all day, anyway.”

Ronan smiles a little, leans forward as Adam kisses his chin, his cheeks, the space between his brows.

“We gotta—we gotta feed Opal,” he says, as Adam moves down to his neck. Hands brush his hands. Ronan takes hold of them. He holds them for a few seconds, reverent, his fingers brushing over the bones of Adam’s knuckles, his wrists.

Adam groans. “You know, people always think I’m the reasonable one, but it’s really you.”

He’s off by a long shot; the ring in Ronan’s pocket could tell anyone that. But Ronan shrugs anyway.  
“C’mon. If we collect the eggs first we can eat them fresh.”

Adam hums. “You’re the best.”

Ronan doesn’t say anything. In his pocket, he reaches for the ring.

Adam sings while he cooks. It’s one of those things he does, disarming in its mundanity. He seems to float past Ronan to reach for the salt. Smiles like sunbeams land on Ronan’s cheek. He focuses on turning the bacon over, on whatever game Opal’s playing that involves terrorising Chainsaw.

Ronan knows this song; it was one his mom loved, used to spin him and Matthew around and around while this song played on their souped-up dream radio. Niall claimed it played whatever song his mom loved most at that moment. Thinking back, Ronan doesn’t know how true that was. Whether things his mom loved were just the things Niall loved repeated, made more tender, more womanly. 

Adam smiles, waving his spatula around to the beat. Occasionally, he’ll stop to hum an instrumental section. He can’t cook for shit, and Ronan tells him so.

Adam laughs. “Good thing I have you, then, huh?”

Ronan turns away to hide his scarlet face. This makes Adam laugh again, softer this time. “Ronan,” he says.

Ronan breathes. Adam is standing in the doorway, looking at him. He says, “Ronan,” again, and his eyes are warm and there is a promise in them, and Ronan feels the ring burn against his thigh, hot but not painful, just warm, as if there’s a small patch of sunlight concentrated there.

He breathes again. “I’m gonna be your kept woman, huh? I’d be pretty shitty at it.”

He pokes at the bacon; it’s beginning to burn. Adam shrugs, reaches out to tap at Ronan’s hip. “You wouldn’t. You’d love it.” Adam is not a man of many words, but he keeps going anyway. “You’d get to be so bossy, and you love cooking, you liar, and chasing after Opal all day – all of it. You’d – you’d make so many goddamn pancakes every morning we’d have to have them for lunch as well.”

“Shit, Parrish, you’ve thought about this.”

It’s Adam’s turn to turn red, and he does, a blush staining his face with embarrassment. “Yeah. I guess I have.”

“You _want_ me to be your kept woman.”

“No,” he says. “I _want_ a future with you.”

Ronan blinks. “You—“

Adam shifts, redness pooling high on his cheekbones. “Yeah. I––Ronan, I know you won’t believe this, but you make me feel so _much._ ” He runs a hand through his hair, shaky. Ronan wants to reach out and touch it. “Fuck, it’s too early for this. What I’m trying to say is––when I see you, my day is better. When I’m at school, and I’m with my Harvard friends, I’m happy, but I’m also thinking about how I’d like to be here, with you. And I don’t know what I’m going to do when I graduate, how I’m going to deal with a proper job, and life here, and all that, but, Ronan, I want to deal with that stuff with you.”

Ronan breathes out, trying to level himself out before he speaks. “Adam,” he says. “You know I… shit, you know I want that too.”

Adam smiles: it’s a thin smile, but bright. He reaches out with his beautiful hands. They’re shaking ever so slightly, so Ronan takes them, holds them, cradles them to his chest. Adam kisses his cheek, tucking his head against Ronan’s neck. They sway together a little, as if they are standing at the top of a hill in the wind, or dancing shyly at junior prom. It’s disgusting. If he saw Gansey and Sargent and Cheng like this, Ronan would leave the room, but not before pretending to vomit.

“What’s in your pocket?” Adam asks. He’s pressed up against him, his eyes vivid and clear.

Ronan grunts.

Adam smiles, the arch sort of smile he gets when he feels like he’s winning something. “Okay,” he says. Ronan tightens his grip on his hands, leans forward so his forehead brushes against Adam’s.

“I dreamt it,” he begins.

“Okay,” Adam says. “Look, you don’t have to do anything––“

“No. Fuck, you think I was gonna _plan_ this? It’s probably better that my subconscious sprung it on me.”

Adam laughs, quietly. He reaches out, towards Ronan’s face. “You’re an idiot,” he says, lovingly. He strokes Ronan’s brow, runs his hand over the back of his head.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Marry me?” Ronan asks, his smirk curving the words into a challenge.

Adam pulls back, rolling his eyes. “Fuck you,” he says. “Of course.”

**Author's Note:**

> non dubita - don't hesitate
> 
> ive never been to any of the places gansey/blue/henry go in this fic i just think theyre cool.
> 
> EDIT: I’ve been writing to many essays recently and mistyped gansey’s name as gatsby! i fixed it, but if u notice any similar mistakes pls lmk! thank u :)
> 
> EDIT 2 (sorry lol): im working on a narnia au right now that's shaping up to be around 25000 words. i'd really love some advice/thoughts if anyone is interested pls [message me on tumblr](https://hamletfucks.tumblr.com/)! thank you :)


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